μ‐PULSER: A reactive operating system for personal robots

When the “personal robot,” which is one of the future goals of the autonomous mobile robot, is viewed from the standpoint of computer control, there must be a reactive mechanism that reflects the sudden change of the sensor output on the emergency processing task. When the personal robot is viewed as a robot owned by the individual and to be used for the individual purposes, it must be highly expandable and flexible so that the functions and the hardware configuration can be varied according to the purpose. To support such a robot, the authors developed a multithread operating system μ‐PULSER. μ‐PULSER provides a high‐speed synchronization mechanism among threads, which helps to realize the reactive control of the robot. The high‐speed communication mechanism is provided among the threads, by utilizing the forementioned synchronization mechanism. By minimizing the kernel, it is made possible to reconfigure dynamically the system by exchanging and adding the servers. This paper discusses the design and implementation of μ‐PULSER. It is shown by actual measurement and evaluation that the synchronization and the communication mechanism among the threads have sufficiently high speeds to meet the requirement of robot control.